Good Will Blogging
How do you like them apples...

As much as I would love to live the independent developer lifestyle, unfortunately, I have a day job. I work for a big financial company as a software architect and I manage a large team of engineers. For those who don’t know what the finance industry is like, one of its defining traits is an obsession with information security. As such, there is no way in hell my company would ever let me connect my iPad to the company’s network. Actually, they don’t even have a wireless network.

Nevertheless, I wanted to start using my shiny new iPad (3) in anger at work, so over the past two weeks I have ditched my trusty paper notebook for an iPad. I’ve gone all-in. Mostly I take the iPad to meetings, where I use the gorgeous Meetings for iPad to take notes. The app includes a brilliant feature to email the notes to attendees, but of course sending from my iPad meant the email would come from my personal email address. Most people wouldn’t notice that, so when they reply all to comment on something, I get emails to my personal email address. Definitely not cool with the information security folks.

Luckily, it turns out there is a simple way to get around this, using Gmail’s “send mail as” feature. Now I can send emails from my iPad and they appear for all the world to have come from my work computer. Here’s how to set it up:

1. Sign up for a new Gmail account. Yes, you’ll want a new Gmail account for this, as we’ll see later.
2. Go to Settings (now hidden in one of the two gear-icon buttons… ugh).
3. Click the Accounts tab.
4. In the “Send mail as” section, click “Add another email address you own”.
5. Type in your company email address, and deselect “Treat as an alias”. Click “Next Step”.
6. On the next screen, leave the first option selected, to send via the Gmail mail server, and click “Next Step”.
7. Click the “Send Verification” button, and check your company email. You should get a confirmation code from Google, which you can enter on the next screen.
8. Back on the Accounts tab in Gmail Settings, click the “make default” link next to your company email address. This means that all emails send from this Gmail account will use your company address by default (which is why I advise setting up a new Gmail account for this).
9. Now, on your iPad (or iPhone), set up the Gmail account as you would normally.
10. Finally, go to Google Sync on your iPad, and select the option to allow “Send Mail As”.

Now when you send an email from iPad, just select your “work” Gmail account in the From field. That’s it!

I’ve had the iPad (3) for about 2 weeks now, and although the screen is stunningly sharp, I have to say that apart from being much larger (obviously), it is not as good as the iPhone 4/4S screen.

The main complaint is that the iPad’s screen is not bonded to the front glass, like the iPhone’s. The improvement Apple made when they first did that in the iPhone 4 was, I think, one of the most underrated and underreported features of the new display. I think Gruber put it best:

More importantly, though, is that it looks better. The effect is that the pixels appear to be painted on the surface of the phone; instead of looking at pixels under glass, it’s like looking at pixels on glass. Combined with the incredibly high pixel density, the overall effect is like “live print”.

It also improves the field of view for the display — you can view the display from an oblique angle and it looks great. Again, like print. It’s like a glossy magazine come to life.

On the larger iPad display however, the downsides of having a layer of air behind the glass are more noticeable. Two surfaces (the front glass, and the display itself) mean double the reflections. And the reflections don’t quite line up, so the area of screen affected by a reflection is bigger. Also, you can see the reflection of the glass move when your finger places pressure on it.

Don’t get me wrong — it still feels like an ultra–premium display, and much better than anything out there at this size — but to me, the iPhone 4S still has the best-looking display of any device on the planet.

I hope that the iPad 4 closes this figurative and literal gap next year.

Update: Thinking about this further, I wonder why Apple built it this way. That thin layer of air is clearly more than 0.6mm thick — the increase in thickness of iPad (3) over iPad 2 — which implies that not bonding the display to the glass was more important than keeping the same thickness as iPad 2.

In other words, bonding the larger display to the glass either presents such difficult engineering challenges, or impacts the overall quality to such a degree, that Apple was willing to bear the potential negative consequences of releasing a thicker product. And now I can’t stop wondering what was so important.

The following is a note to myself to remember how to set up Gmail and Google Calendar properly on iOS.

1. Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Add Account…
2. Don’t select Gmail. Instead, select Microsoft Exchange.
3. Enter the following details and tap Next.
   Email: your email address
   Domain: leave blank
   Username: your email address
   Password: your password
   Description: “Gmail”
4. A “Server” field will appear. In it, enter “m.google.com” and tap Next.
5. Choose the items to sync.
6. Open Safari, and go to https://m.google.com/sync/settings/iconfig/chooseCalendars.
7. Sign in with the Gmail account address & password.
8. Select the calendars you want to be selectable on iPhone/iPad.

There are more detailed options in the Settings app, but the defaults you get with the above steps are pretty good.

The main benefits of setting them up this way are:

• Push email, contacts, and calendar.
• In my experience so far, this seems to help battery life, since there is no need to have a regular fetch every 15 minutes.
• Calendar editing is two-way, so you can create and edit appointments on the iPhone, and have them show up everywhere else.
• Invitations work.
• You can select subscribed calendars as well.

Apple has always been careful to call the Apple TV a “hobby” — until now. During the announcement of the 2012 Apple TV, just before the iPad (3) was announced, nobody mentioned the word “hobby”.

And now, I see that the Apple TV occupies one of the high-profile panels on Apple’s home page. Even more amazing: the iPhone is nowhere to be seen on the home page. There are 5 spots on the home page, and they are currently occupied by, in order: iPad, iPad, iPad, iPad, Apple TV.